Introduction
The subject matter of beauty is one of which there are no shortage of opinions to consider. A great many brilliant minds have asked, as Plotinus asked, “What is it that attracts the eyes of those to whom a beautiful object is presented, and calls them, lures them, towards it, and fills them with joy at the sight?” In fact the subject is one that does not keep itself to the ivory towers of academia but it is a conversation the average person has regularly as we argue about what is beautiful and what is not whether it be in animals, a piece of art or a human being. And none of us like to feel we may have been wrong about beauty either as Elliot notes “It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine—something like being blind.”
While part of this paper will attempt to give something of a survey of ideas on beauty it must be acknowledged at the outset that it will be a somewhat scant kind of survey given the amount of room allotted to this particular work. Even so, what I will demonstrate, in light of the diversity of thought on the subject matter of beauty, or as some prefer to call it, aesthetics, is that the only hope we have of knowing beauty as an objective reality is to accept the existence of God and to acknowledge him as revelator. God must be the one who defines beauty. Further, when we accept this truth that beauty exists objectively because God provides sufficient grounding for it (He is, after all, the creator and designer of all things that exist apart from himself) we can begin to approach an idea of beauty in the arts, and in nature, and in one another, through a careful consideration of God’s revelation in the holy Scriptures. But first let us consider what the world has had to say about beauty in the greatest of literature.
Surveying the Literature
In this section I will survey the spectrum of views on what beauty is, where it can be found, and how we can properly appraise it. What we will see is a wide variety of ideas some which get along fine together but many of which are not reconcilable with one another. The difficulty this poses, as to determining who is right and who is wrong about beauty, will then be the subject matter of the next section of the paper. I will demonstrate the necessity of God in order to have a meaningful sense of what beauty is.
On the Method of Determining the Beautiful
Eduard Hanslick in his book, On the Musically Beautiful, argues on one hand that there are objective standards for beauty and yet, on the other hand, that each kind of art should be judged by its own standards. He begins by saying in regard to his investigation into the musically beautiful that, “if it is not to be wholly illusory, this investigation will have to approach the method of the natural sciences…” Further, he goes on to say:
The servile dependence of the various special aesthetics upon a supreme metaphysical principle of a general aesthetics is steadily yielding ground to the conviction that each particular art demands to be understood only of itself, through a knowledge of its unique technical characteristics. System building is giving way to research firmly based on the axiom that the laws of beauty proper to each particular art are inseparable from the distinctive characteristics of its material and its technique.
Here Hanslick suggests several notions. First he argues that if an investigation into beauty is going to be meaningful that it has to take the form the scientific method. In this statement Hanslick has seemingly pushed philosophy to the side as a meaningful form of inquiry into this topic. Secondly he has denied that there is any universal standard of beauty which all the arts are subject to but, rather, he believes each art ought to be judged only according to the standard of its own “material and technique.” In so doing, while Hanslick would say he is working for objectivity in discovering beauty in the arts, he has actually made beauty completely subjective because there are not universal truths about beauty there are only truths relative to each discipline.
Whereas Hanslick believes the scientific method is the only way forward and negates the place of philosophy in the discovery of beauty the truth is that most of the discussion of beauty throughout history has resided primarily among the philosophers. Whether it be Plato or Aristotle or later Aquinas or a good many other who certainly deserve mention the discussion about the nature of beauty raged for centuries among the philosophers before modernists tried to systematize everything into the natural sciences. The pre-modern philosophers recognize beauty as something that existed in itself and which objects in the world only participated in. Socrates asked one of his inquirers, “But take the case of the other, who recognises the existence of absolute beauty and is able to distinguish the idea from the objects which participate in the idea, neither putting the objects in the place of the idea nor the idea in the place of the objects—is he a dreamer, or is he awake?” So, is beauty a thing to be discovered by means of philosophy or by modern scientific method?
Beauty in Art Versus Beauty in Nature
Within the realm of aesthetic discussion there even lies the debate as to whether or not one can properly call art beautiful or whether that is fitting only for nature and vice versa. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel takes the position that art is the true place to discuss beauty and he stops just short of absolutely denying that anything in nature might be rightfully called beautiful. In speaking of the discipline of aesthetics Hegel says the following:
The proper expression, however, for our science is the ‘Philosophy of Art’, or, more definitely, the ‘Philosophy of Fine Art’. By the above expression we at once exclude the beauty of Nature. Such a limitation of our subject may appear to be an arbitrary demarcation, resting on the principle that every science has the prerogative of marking out its boundaries at pleasure. But this is not the sense in which we are to understand the limitation of Aesthetic to the beauty of art. It is true that in common life we are in the habit of speaking of beautiful colour, a beautiful sky, a beautiful river, and, moreover, of beautiful flowers, beautiful animals, and, above all, of beautiful human beings. We will not just now enter into the controversy how far such objects can justly have the attribute of beauty ascribed to them, or how far, speaking generally, natural beauty ought to be recognized as existing besides artistic beauty. We may, however, begin at once by asserting that artistic beauty stands higher than nature.
Plotinus agrees with Hegel and, indeed, goes one further than him in saying that art itself is more beautiful than what is rendered by the artist:
Now it must be seen that the stone thus brought under the artist’s hand to the beauty of form is beautiful not as stone—for so the crude block would be as pleasant—but in virtue of the form or idea introduced by the art. This form is not in the material; it is in the designer before ever it enters the stone; and the artificer holds it not by his equipment of eyes and hands but by his participation in his art. The beauty, therefore, exists in a far higher state in the art; for it does not come over integrally into the work; that original beauty is not transferred; what comes over is a derivative and a minor: and even that shows itself upon the statue not integrally and with entire realization of intention but only in so far as it has subdued the resistance of the material. Art, then, creating in the image of its own nature and content, and working by the Idea or Reason-Principle of the beautiful object it is to produce, must itself be beautiful in a far higher and purer degree since it is the seat and source of that beauty, indwelling in the art, which must naturally be more complete than any comeliness of the external. In the degree in which the beauty is diffused by entering into matter, it is so much the weaker than that concentrated in unity; everything that reaches outwards is the less for it, strength less strong, heat less hot, every power less potent, and so beauty less beautiful.
Plotinus, then, sees three things in play in art. First is the raw material such as stone for the sculptor to use which, in his mind, is most lacking in beauty because it is the thing which needs formed. Second is the finished work of the artist which he has used raw material to create by refining them with tools appropriate to his medium. Thirdly, there is art itself which he speaks of as an immaterial reality, agreeing with Socrates and Plato above, it is a kind of pure form that loses something in translation into the tangible. So, for Plotinus, absolute beauty exists intangibly, receives something of a physical representation by the artist and the raw material he uses, that of nature, is the lowest on the rung of beauty.
Kant, being completely on the other side of this matter, spends nearly his entire discussion of beauty on the natural realm and gives hardly so much as a hat tip to art. He asks his reader “how we are to explain why nature has scattered beauty abroad with so lavish a hand, even in the depth of the ocean where it can but seldom be reached by the eye of man—for which alone it is final?” He, of course, spends much of what follows attempting to answer this question but with all of his example of beauty being those in nature.
Voltaire, through one of his characters in Candide, expresses a strong opinion that paintings are only beautiful when they so imitate nature that he cannot tell he is not looking at the thing itself.
Candide, walking in a long gallery after breakfast, was astonished at the beauty of the pictures. He asked what master had painted the first two. “They are by Raphael,” said the Senator; “I bought them very expensively out of vanity a few years ago; they are supposed to be the most beautiful things in Italy, but they don’t please me at all; their color has turned very dark brown, the figures are not rounded enough and do not stand out enough; the draperies don’t resemble cloth at all; in a word, whatever they say, I don’t find in them a true imitation of nature. I will only like a picture when I think I am seeing nature itself; there aren’t any of that kind. I have many pictures, but I no longer look at them.”
So, again we must ask, who is right? Is beauty to be found primarily in art or the fine arts or is it legitimately to be sought in the natural realms as well? If, in fact, it can be determined that beauty can fairly be spoken of in the natural realm we have yet still disagreements about what in nature can rightly be called beautiful.
On What is Beautiful in Nature
Many of the aesthetic philosophers are disposed to think that beauty in nature is equated with a thing being what it ought to be by nature. That is to say when an animal is well formed and healthy, not limping or missing a leg, nor sickly and starved, and quite symmetrical in appearance, that all is as it should be and it is a beautiful animal. Plato refers to what he considers a universal truth of beauty in symmetry stating, “for measure and symmetry are beauty and virtue all the world over.” Aristotle takes also this view of beauty being a kind of fitness of nature when he writes:
[I]n like manner we regard beauty, strength, and all the other bodily excellences and defects. Each of them exists in virtue of a particular relation and puts that which possesses it in a good or bad condition with regard to its proper affections, where by ‘proper’ affections I mean those influences that from the natural constitution of a thing tend to promote or destroy its existence.
But, quite oppositely, Marcus Aurelius suggests that some things can be beautiful when it fails to conform to its own nature.
We ought to observe also that even the things which follow after the things which are produced according to nature contain something pleasing and attractive. For instance, when bread is baked some parts are split at the surface, and these parts which thus open, and have a certain fashion contrary to the purpose of the baker’s art, are beautiful in a manner, and in a peculiar way excite a desire for eating. And again, figs, when they are quite ripe, gape open; and in the ripe olives the very circumstance of their being near to rottenness adds a peculiar beauty to the fruit.
Beauty as Moral Virtue Rather than Appearance
Other authors attribute beauty primarily to moral virtues rather than physical appearance per se. Consider the following excerpt from Epictetus on what makes a person beautiful:
A certain young man a rhetorician came to see Epictetus, with his hair dressed more carefully than was usual and his attire in an ornamental style; whereupon Epictetus said: Tell me if you do not think that some dogs are beautiful and some horses, and so of all other animals. “I do think so,” the youth replied. Are not then some men also beautiful and others ugly? “Certainly.” Do we, then, for the same reason call each of them in the same kind beautiful, or each beautiful for something peculiar? And you will judge of this matter thus. Since we see a dog naturally formed for one thing, and a horse for another, and for another still, as an example, a nightingale, we may generally and not improperly declare each of them to be beautiful then when it is most excellent according to its nature; but since the nature of each is different, each of them seems to me to be beautiful in a different way. Is it not so? He admitted that it was. That then which makes a dog beautiful, makes a horse ugly; and that which makes a horse beautiful, makes a dog ugly, if it is true that their natures are different. “It seems to be so.” For I think that what makes a pancratiast beautiful, makes a wrestler to be not good, and a runner to be most ridiculous; and he who is beautiful for the Pentathlon, is very ugly for wrestling. “It is so,” said he. What, then, makes a man beautiful? Is it that which in its kind makes both a dog and a horse beautiful? “It is,” he said. What then makes a dog beautiful? The possession of the excellence of a dog. And what makes a horse beautiful? The possession of the excellence of a horse. What then makes a man beautiful? Is it not the possession of the excellence of a man? And do you, then, if you wish to be beautiful, young man, labour at this, the acquisition of human excellence. But what is this? Observe whom you yourself praise, when you praise many persons without partiality: do you praise the just or the unjust? “The just.” Whether do you praise the moderate or the immoderate? “The moderate.” And the temperate or the intemperate? “The temperate.” If, then, you make yourself such a person, you will know that you will make yourself beautiful: but so long as you neglect these things, you must be ugly, even though you contrive all you can to appear beautiful.
This idea, virtue as beauty, we will see later finds biblical support as well. But it worth noting that this kind of beauty is purely a non-physical beauty but that does not make it any less a real beauty.
On Whether Beauty is Eternal or Created
Another important question that is raised in the aesthetic dialog is to the temporal or eternal nature of beauty. Is beauty a created and therefore contingent thing or is it an eternal and necessary thing? Again the answers vary and conflict.
Those who suppose, as the Pythagoreans and Speusippus do, that supreme beauty and goodness are not present in the beginning, because the beginnings both of plants and of animals are causes, but beauty and completeness are in the effects of these, are wrong in their opinion. For the seed comes from other individuals which are prior and complete, and the first thing is not seed but the complete being; e.g. we must say that before the seed there is a man,—not the man produced from the seed, but another from whom the seed comes. It is clear then from what has been said that there is a substance which is eternal and unmovable and separate from sensible things. It has been shown also that this substance cannot have any magnitude, but is without parts and indivisible (for it produces movement through infinite time, but nothing finite has infinite power; and, while every magnitude is either infinite or finite, it cannot, for the above reason, have finite magnitude, and it cannot have infinite magnitude because there is no infinite magnitude at all). But it has also been shown that it is impassive and unalterable; for all the other changes are posterior to change of place.
Here above Aristotle has taken up for the position that beauty is an eternal substance without beginning. But it must be reasoned that such a view is one that has determined beauty to exist as an objective thing in itself. Necessarily then any view that sees beauty as subjective must hold to the contrary view that beauty is at best a created and contingent thing and, at worst, a mere illusion fooling the masses into believing something exists when it does not.
On Whether Beauty is Objective or Subjective
It does not take a very deep survey of the greatest literature of the Western tradition on the matter of beauty to see that the ancients were much more inclined to the position that objects actually had or possessed beauty. This is opposed to the notion that all statements such “that is a beautiful thing” is actually a statement about the subject speaking rather than the object which they are speaking about. Consider this excerpt from Marcus Aurelius:
Everything which is in any way beautiful is beautiful in itself, and terminates in itself, not having praise as part of itself. Neither worse then nor better is a thing made by being praised. I affirm this also of the things which are called beautiful by the vulgar, for example, material things and works of art. That which is really beautiful has no need of anything; not more than law, not more than truth, not more than benevolence or modesty. Which of these things is beautiful because it is praised, or spoiled by being blamed? Is such a thing as an emerald made worse than it was, if it is not praised? Or gold, ivory, purple, a lyre, a little knife, a flower, a shrub?
Now we must note the startling shift in language when we reach modernity as it pertains to beauty. Kant, who is among the major minds in the shift to modernist thinking, makes a strong contrast between what is logical and what is aesthetic. An assumption which needs more backing than he can give it. “The judgement of taste, therefore, is not a cognitive judgement, and so not logical, but is aesthetic—which means that it is one whose determining ground cannot be other than subjective.”
Likewise Charles Darwin, the father of the theory of the common ancestry of all living things, states all the more forcefully his view that beauty is nothing to be spoken of objectively but simply as a reference to our own selves rather than the object we think we are speaking of.
With respect to the belief that organic beings have been created beautiful for the delight of man,—a belief which it has been pronounced is subversive of my whole theory,—I may first remark that the sense of beauty obviously depends on the nature of the mind, irrespective of any real quality in the admired object; and that the idea of what is beautiful, is not innate or unalterable. We see this, for instance, in the men of different races admiring an entirely different standard of beauty in their women.
Responding to just these sort of notions as Darwin and Kant have put forth Roger Scruton has but forth this evaluation:
That familiar relativism has led some people to dismiss judgements of beauty as purely ‘subjective’. No tastes can be criticized, they argue, since to criticize one taste is simply to give voice to another; hence there is nothing to learn or to teach that could conceivably deserve the name of ‘criticism’. This attitude has put in question many of the traditional disciplines in the humanities. The studies of art, music, literature and architecture, freed from the discipline of aesthetic judgement, seem to lack the firm anchor in tradition and technique that enabled our predecessors to regard them as central to the curriculum....I suggest that such sceptical thoughts about beauty are unjustified. Beauty, I argue, is a real and universal value, one anchored in our rational nature, and the sense of beauty has an indispensable part to play in shaping the human world. My approach to the topic is not historical, neither am I concerned to give a psychological, still less an evolutionary, explanation of the sense of beauty. My approach is philosophical, and the principal sources for my argument are the works of philosophers.
So while many come to the all too typical conclusion that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, which is merely a poetic way of saying that beauty is completely subjective, it seems that this is a more modern idea than not. Furthermore it is wrongheaded to think that just because people disagree en masse about aesthetic judgment that the answer is to reject the notion that there is objective truth on the matter. In the next section of this paper I will agree with Scruton and others that beauty is something that has objective existence and which a person can be in sync with and judge rightly about, or a person can make a wrong judgment about beauty and out of step with truth.
Making a Case for Objective Beauty
In the last section we compared pieces of writings on the subject of beauty in which there were numerous points of disagreement and of which no man, in himself, seems to have authority to rule upon in any final way. Further we saw at last that even the matter of whether beauty exists as a thing in itself has come into question as pre-modernists usually seemed to think that it does and the modernists usually relegate such notions to being subjective feeling about objects rather than rightful rulings on the objects themselves.Clive Staples Lewis notes in his Abolition of Man that, “Until quite modern times all teachers and even all men believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it— believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive, but could merit, our approval or disapproval, our reverence or our contempt.” Here it is my goal to stick up the pre-modernist on this matter and make a case for the objectivity of beauty and it is that case I now turn.
Philosophers have long discussed another area of inquiry which I believe to be parallel to our current discussion. The inquiry I refer to is about the of nature morality. One will notice upon even a brief moment of consideration how similarly people talk about beauty and morality. Both are often said to merely represent a personal point of view and that any notion of objectivity is merely an illusion. Indeed Darwin’s thoughts on the matter of beauty (as mentioned above) are reflected in his followers thoughts about morality today.
Yet upon more reflection surely we all have a different sense of things! Intuitively we seem to know that just as some acts are truly virtuous and praiseworthy other acts are truly evil and deserve our condemnation. A man pushing a child out of the way of a truck but giving up his own life in the process is surely a praiseworthy deed just as much as a man using a child for a shield between him and a soldier is a reprehensible action. Beauty is the same in this way. We all seem to know that beauty is real, we certainly speak of it as such, and we are constantly trying to convince other people to see the beauty of something or someone.
In response to the question of morality some philosophers have put forth an argument for God’s existence. The argument entails that the existence of objective moral values demonstrates God’s existence, but the argument works both directions. If objective moral values exist, then God exists and if God exists then there is sufficient grounds for objective moral values. In fact God’s existence and perfect nature is the only sufficient grounds imaginable for objective moral values which means that if moral truth exist God necessarily does as well. The argument is a perfectly valid one, logically speaking, whether a person finds it cogent or not depends upon whether or not they are persuaded that there are objective moral values, of course, but few can live consistently with the implication of morality being truly subjective.
I am arguing the same way for the existence of objective beauty. If objective beauty exists then God exists. Objective beauty exists. Therefore, God exists. In turn I also argue that God’s existence is the only sufficient grounding for objective aesthetic values. Like the moral issue we run into the very definite problem of lacking an authoritative voice within mankind. Imagine that you and a friend stand before the same painting and one of you says it is beautiful and the other says it is horridly ugly. Who is right? What authority does one man have over the other that his view should be finally accepted as the correct one? Clearly on the individual level beauty cannot be decided because individuals disagree.
However, some will surely say, it is the wider culture that decides what is beautiful rather than individuals. But this too is hopelessly subjective for cultures clash with other cultures. What Europeans find beautiful may not strike the fancy of the North African. Further, what cultures value as beautiful has been known to change over time so that within the same culture, a hundred years later, there may be an entirely different fad for what is considered beautiful.
But while this is the very argument that Darwin put for to relegate beauty to the realm of subjectivity it is worth noting that just because individuals and cultures disagree or even change their mind about beauty over time this hardly amounts to the conclusion beauty does not exist. An important question to ask may be, “If beauty does not exist then why are we incapable of speaking as though it does not?” Further if every time people disagreed about a subject we simply threw up our hands in the air and proclaimed there is no truth to be found then how many of the things we now know to be true (such as the earth revolves around the sun) would we still be stuck on? Certainly people saw it differently at one point but that did not stop the best argument from eventually winning the day. It is clear, then, that disagreement about what the truth is is hardly the same as conceding that no truth exists in the matter.
Just as with some moral issues there may be some so-called gray areas as to what is moral or immoral it reasons well to conclude that there may be areas of gray in the matter of beauty. As Christians we recognize that we are a fallen race and in a broken universe in need of mending. We may find ourselves in situations that lack moral clarity and situations that lack aesthetic clarity because of the fallen state of things. This may be because we now live in a world where good and evil collide in such a way that it is difficult to find pure examples of either. In this way an action may be mostly good but not completely altruistic and a painting may feature true elements of beauty but still dabble in sinful rebellion. But these gray areas do not suffice to rid us of the idea that moral and aesthetic truth really do exist.
I think, however, that we have all experienced, to greater or lesser degrees, moments of clarity about moral and aesthetic truths. We have been shocked by images of holocaust victims bodies piled without care in trenches and in such a moment who but the sociopath could not confirm the evil that was done. Similarly we have stood before oceans or mountains or met the love of our lives and been ravished by beauty and almost transported elsewhere while our feet remained stationary. It is in the extremes that all the gray areas are melted away by the light of truth.
Nonetheless the problem of determining what is beautiful is a real one. Beauty is not, afterall, determined by instruments such as telescopes, microscopes and yard sticks. The debate about beauty is first and foremost a philosophical one. Just as with the difficulty of moral truth we must realize that aesthetic truth, if it as real as we all sense that it is, must be decided by an authority higher than man. If we accept not only the existence of God but the fact that God has spoken to us in both nature and in Scripture then we find ourselves with both sufficient grounding for the existence of beauty and a real starting point for its discovery. For what God calls beautiful must necessarily be so.
Biblical Revelation and Beauty
God has said of himself through the prophet Moses “God is not man, that he should lie.” Likewise the Spirit of God moved in Paul who wrote the God “never lies.” Furthermore God has not merely proclaimed his truthfulness but he has demonstrated it in his covenant keeping and fulfilment of prophecies and especially in raising his son from the dead as Jesus said he would. Yes, whatever God says is true and therefore what he reveals about beauty can be relied on with absolute certainty.
One thing that is clear in Scripture is that beauty exists objectively as part of God’s nature. The Psalmist proclaims “One thing have I asked of the LORD, that will I seek after: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and to inquire in his temple.” And again “Splendor and majesty are before him; strength and beauty are in his sanctuary.” God is himself beautiful to gaze upon and dwells in beauty and this can be no subjective opinion but a fundamental truth. It is highly doubtful that anyone who stood in God’s presence would be able to deny this truth but, even if they could, they would find themselves out of sync with the truth of the matter. God is beauty and has created other beautiful things and the goal of those seeking to believe what is true is to call beautiful that which God calls beautiful.
Natural Beauty
That God is not only beautiful himself but the creator of beauty is also made clear at many points in Scripture starting from the very beginning. In Genesis 2:9a the Scripture says, “And out of the ground the LORD God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.” Part of God’s perfect creation was the making of trees which were pleasant to the sight. This proclamation is made without qualification which is to say that to disagree that the trees were beautiful would be wrong and out of sync with reality.
We are told that the grass of the field has beauty as well, even if it a temporary beauty. “For the sun rises with its scorching heat and withers the grass; its flower falls, and its beauty perishes. So also will the rich man fade away in the midst of his pursuits.” It is reasonable to extend beauty to all of nature insofar as it possesses its original pre-fall qualities. This means, as likely as not, that most things in nature have beauty but may also have more or less deficiencies according to the effect of the fall. Some of what we see in nature, however, may not be an original part of God’s creation but purely a result of the curse because of sin. Consider what God said to Adam at the fall of man:
And to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
So then the original creation was perfectly beautiful and the fallen world retains much of that beauty but it is now a mixed universe like a tarnished mirror that still reflects its creator but with smudges that obscure his perfection from our sight.
Virtue as Beauty
The pre-Christian philosophers were often very close in their quests to understand beauty and even the divine. Even Paul makes note of how close they come in their understanding in his discussion with the Greek thinkers at Mars Hill. He states:
So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for “‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, “‘For we are indeed his offspring.’ Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”
One such way they came close to their understanding was in that beauty can not only apply to things but to virtue. Sometimes being beautiful is as much about the kind of person you are as opposed to your physical appearance. That is to say there is more than one way to be a beautiful person. The apostle Peter says under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, “Do not let your adorning be external—the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear— but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious.” This virtuous beauty is a kind that never fades as long as virtue is maintained.
Beautiful Clothing
Even when it comes to clothing the Bible is not silent as to beautiful adornment. The clothes for the priests, Aaron and his sons, were commanded to be made beautiful. “And you shall make holy garments for Aaron your brother, for glory and for beauty.” God never commands the impossible, or if he does he fulfills it himself on our behalf such as his command, “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Thankfully this is fulfilled by Christ on our behalf. But imagine that God has commanded the production of beauty! If beauty were not a thing in itself then this would be commanding the impossible.
Beauty in Art
God has even commissioned art in the more traditional sense. In the biblical book of Exodus the Lord specially called and empowered artists to make and direct the construction of his tabernacle:
The Lord said to Moses, “See, I have called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft. And behold, I have appointed with him Oholiab, the son of Ahisamach, of the tribe of Dan. And I have given to all able men ability, that they may make all that I have commanded you: the tent of meeting, and the ark of the testimony, and the mercy seat that is on it, and all the furnishings of the tent, the table and its utensils, and the pure lampstand with all its utensils, and the altar of incense, and the altar of burnt offering with all its utensils, and the basin and its stand, and the finely worked garments, the holy garments for Aaron the priest and the garments of his sons, for their service as priests, and the anointing oil and the fragrant incense for the Holy Place. According to all that I have commanded you, they shall do.”
In Exodus 36 through 39 the process of making the tabernacle and it’s beautiful pieces of art is explained in great depth.
From this commissioning we learn several things. First, we learn that God loves different kinds of art. The artwork in the tabernacle involved woodworking, silver and goldsmithing, architecture and weaving just to name a few forms art that were employed. Secondly, we learn that part of how God made us to be like him is that he made us to be artists. As God is the great Creator so we are sub-creators in his image. It is sometimes levied as a criticism against a piece of art that it is “derivative” but the truth is all art is derivative. We are merely taking things God has already made, already thought of, and mixing them around and reordering them. There are no original ideas and that is okay. We are like children picking up their father’s tools and mimicking his handiwork.
Human Beauty
The Scripture may make more references to human beauty than any other kind. Here is but a sample of a few various cases:
On the seventh day, when the heart of the king was merry with wine, he commanded Mehuman, Biztha, Harbona, Bigtha and Abagtha, Zethar and Carkas, the seven eunuchs who served in the presence of King Ahasuerus, to bring Queen Vashti before the king with her royal crown, in order to show the peoples and the princes her beauty, for she was lovely to look at.
The young shepherd boy who would be king was also identified as having qualities of beauty. “And he sent and brought him in. Now he was ruddy and had beautiful eyes and was handsome. And the Lord said, “Arise, anoint him, for this is he.”
Further the Song of Solomon is a book dedicated to the enjoyment of the physical beauty of married lovers. Statements like, “you are beautiful, my love, behold, you are beautiful! Your eyes are doves behind your veil. Your hair is like a flock of goats leaping down the slopes of Gilead” are everywhere in that particular book.
It is no real surprise, given that man is made in the image of God, that we should find people to be in possession of beauty themselves. We are reflections of our creator and although we fall short of perfect beauty and our beauty is but vapor in this life, nonetheless it is a real quality of mankind and meant to be celebrated. But here is a good example of where the gray areas of beauty come into being which we discussed above. The human body is beautiful but because of the fall we are liable to all kind of deficiencies. Mankind was never meant to fade away in age and die and therefore the beauty of youth was meant to be permanent. Further because of our sinful inclinations gained in the fall we do not appreciate the human body as we ought and have wrong desires toward beautiful bodies. This is why a painting can be in one sense truly beautiful but also sinful because the nakedness of others who are not our spouses is not ours to look at. So what is objectively beautiful can be mixed with the ugliness of sin and therefore create aesthetic confusion as much as moral confusion.
Many more example of beauty and artistry of varied forms could be cited from Scripture but what we should take away is, at the least, 1) that beauty exists as a divine attribute and therefore exist objectively whether we recognize it where we ought to or not, 2) that God has standards for beauty and they must accord to his revelation of what is true and good in order to be beautiful and that the fall has had a real affect on beauty and our comprehension thereof and finally 3) that beauty resides in both nature and in art, one being his great handiwork and the other being our mimicry of him as sub-creators.
The Importance of a Beautiful Education
Having now given a proper basis for beauty’s objective existence, and having taking but a short look at some of the things which God has called beautiful, we ought to turn now to the importance of beauty and aligning ourselves with a right understanding of it. One of the reasons why beauty, and having a right view of beauty, is such an important issue is because it is so powerful. Contemporary philosopher Roger Scruton, in his book entitled Beauty, has this to say about the sway beauty has over mankind:
Beauty can be consoling, disturbing, sacred, profane; it can be exhilarating, appealing, inspiring, chilling. It can affect us in an unlimited variety of ways. Yet it is never viewed with indifference: beauty demands to be noticed; it speaks to us directly like the voice of an intimate friend. If there are people who are indifferent to beauty, then it is surely because they do not perceive it.
The effect that beauty has on people is often incalculable. Even the eccentric psycho-analytic obsessed Freud correctly noted, “Beauty is an instance which plainly shows that culture is not simply utilitarian in its aims, for the lack of beauty is a thing we cannot tolerate in civilization.” Beauty is in every way an unavoidable and, arguably, a necessary part of life.
Beauty has at times frozen people in their steps and at others called them to action. Lives have been lost in the pursuit of beauty as even one of the greatest wars of human history was fought over the beauty of a woman named Helen. Beauty has cause virtue and it has caused vice. It makes our daily life and routines tolerable when it’s absence makes the same dreadful. People have at time mistaken the ugly for the beautiful and beautiful for the ugly. It is because of it’s power and importance in our individual lives and our culture as a whole that we must learn to be in tune with beautiful just as much as truth and goodness.
Lewis tells us that this need to be rightly educated in beauty was once widely known by the ancients though it is now but lost. He writes:
St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ‘ordinate affections’ or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful. In the Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one ‘who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.’
Notice that Lewis connects training the sentiments to be a precursor to embracing reason itself, something which, if he is correct, few modernists would argue with as being utterly crucial to society.
Scruton notes that the existence of beauty was once a universally accepted truth but it has become lost to modernists.
Let us at least say that this particular path to the understanding of beauty is not easily available to a modern thinker. The confidence with which philosophers once trod it is due to an assumption, made explicit already in the Enneads of Plotinus, that truth, beauty and goodness are attributes of the deity, ways in which the divine unity makes itself known to the human soul.
It’s worth noting that a large part of the issue on the Modernist’s account is its discrediting anything that is not material. In rejection of the immaterial comes the rejection of forms and properties and, indeed, God who is the very basis of truth, goodness and beauty. While modernists have rejected the objectivity of morality and beauty they have clung to the notion of objective truth but they have limited themselves to the scientific method and thereby are suffering from lack of access to many truths. They are, in fact, standing on borrowed ground because truth only belongs in a theistic universe. We must have a right view of beauty if we are to be in sync with reality and if we are to align with the truth of the way the universe is.
In Lewis’ same work, quoted above, he warns of the extreme danger in making a mankind devoid of sentiment, that is, making people who lack the ability to call beautiful or “sublime”, as he uses the term, what is in fact just that. Lewis argues that right sentiments are the key to people being truly human. We should speak with right sentiment about the good and the beautiful, and those ought to correspond to the truth of things. Without sentiment man is not moved. “In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism...about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use.” If we are not able to speak about the actual things which are true, good and beautiful (as opposed to seemingly talking about them but really only be expressing our subjective opinions) then we are left with the bleak options of a sentimentless world which moves no one or deceiving people to believe sentiments that those in the know are perfectly well aware do not exist. On the one hand we create animals moved only by instinct and on the other we create cold logicians that run numbers and care for no one. As Lewis puts it:
The head rules the belly through the chest— the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment— these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.
If we follow modernist designs about the world we live in we will invariably create one or the other or a combination thereof which Lewis calls “men without chests.”
Summary & Conclusion
Through a survey of some of the great literature on the subject of beauty we have seen that there is no shortage of thoughts on beauty and that there is no small variety of opinions, many of which clash irreconcilably. Further while there is variation of views throughout history on beauty we see a particularly striking disparagement of ideas between the premodern and the modernist thinkers especially as it relates to the objective or subjective existence of beauty. We have concluded that the idea of objective beauty demands a final judge which can only be met by the existence of God and if beauty exists God exists. In turn God is the one who not only provides grounding for the existence of beauty but he is the standard of beauty as it is part of his nature and his revelation in nature and especially in Scripture are the standards for determining what is truly beautiful. Finally we considered why being properly educated about beauty really matters.
In conclusion it is my contention that only by acknowledging God’s existence and revelation can we ever truly know not only what is true and what is good but also what is beautiful. It may be rightly said that Plato asked a pertinent question when he asked “Is not the good also the beautiful?” In fact truth, goodness and beauty are all essential attributes of God and it is by him that we know and experience them truly and by his revelation that we may judge rightly about representation of them in our world. The correct judgment of beauty is of real and significant importance and we must educate ourselves and the next generation to see and appreciate the beauty that is all around and distinguish it from the reprehensible.
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